The manuscript for the first novel, Sex Bunker Apocalypse: Seven Decades in Heaven, has returned! It’s all printed out and marked up with two colors of pen, which my father, a brilliant author himself, has assured me is a Good Sign. The book feels strange all printed out. It feels ore real.
I don’t know that I necessarily agree with my father on the two colors. One seems to have declared war on my overuse of hyphens. Apparently there’s this thing called an em-dash and I’ve been using a hyphen instead of it. I removed any and all dashes of varying sorts from the first three chapters before I realized that Google Docs will change a double hyphen keystroke into an em-dash automatically. I wrote all three books in Notepad, like a nitwit (my roommate, an accomplished, published author herself, demanded I not handwrite all three books, so you’re welcome, I suppose) and Google Docs is new to me. My wife, roommate, and editor all threatened me with various terrible things if I didn’t edit in GD, so here we are, adding in a single extra hyphen wherever the author demands it.
The author demands it rather a lot, really. Perhaps it’s the sign of a stenographer (I used to write, word for word, a professor’s lectures for a blind student in college) or perhaps it’s the sign of an amateur writer. I am both of these things, of course. Perhaps I should — but no.
Also the book has a bit of a point of view problem. Not many of you now this, but the whole of SBA 1 was written in four weeks! I wrote it for the November challenge. My spouse was disappointed after a while when I said I’d like to participate in the November challenge. I had to look up why that was. But, on the plus side, there was SBA, written in 28 days. My spouse, housemate and I came up with the idea for the novel while swimming in the pool out back every night that previous summertime. And then November hit, and there was a challenge, and I thought, I can do this. And for two days I definitely didn’t do anything.
So I called up my friendly Muse Summoner, and she got on video chat with me, and I explained my situation. She thought for a bit and said, “I’m going to go do laundry for half an hour, and when I come back, you’ll have something written.” She is, by the way, the only person who gets to speak to me in such decisive tones. So she vanished to do laundry, or maybe drink a little wine, and I sat down and wrote the first pages of Sex Bunker Apocalypse. This would prove to be chapter four. Actually it would prove to be the first chapter four, of two, because I am a nitwit and cannot count.
Our heroes are stranded by the side of the road, in the dark, as a storm rolls in. Back then everyone was a little vague in my mind, except for Terri, who remains much the same now as she first appeared. Quay was smaller, and not quite so strong, and Euclid was, well, Euclid was an anomaly, and some part of me feels he remains so, even after editing. But since nobody was fully fleshed out, I didn’t feel emotionally involved with any of them just yet. So there’s this third person omniscent point of view. My muse wrangler returned, she loved it, and the next day I wrote chapter three.
Apparently this isn’t how you normally write a book, but soon enough chapters one and two were banged out, and the characters started whispering to me, and around the time our heroes become trapped in the Bunker, it became clear that each chapter would have to be written from the viewpoint of one of the trio. This changes, eventually, in the third book, Sex Bunker Apocalypse; Handcuffed to Never. But for SBA 1 it worked out well.
So the manuscript reflects this, and I’ve gone back and given the first five or six chapters a makeover, adding more hyphens, all the usual. As a new author/writer it’s an odd experience, having to take those early, somewhat bumbling chapters and make them the emotional property of one of the triad’s. Euclid, for example, gets two chapters’ point of view back to back, something I’ve never done. But for the most part it’s clear where Terri’s the main focus, clear where Quay’s careful, methodical take on things will suit this chapter or that.
Part of me still feels that, out of every chapter in the trilogy, that there shouldn’t be a point of view in the fourth chapter. The three characters are standing by the side of the road, holding hands, already loving each other as friends do. They are not lovers, but they are all afraid of the dark, of the electricity failing, of being alone. It is the only time during all three books where I feel myself standing next to them. I would hold Euclid’s hand, I think, mostly because Quay wouldn’t want to hold a stranger’s hand, and also because Quay would have to be in the middle. Terri’s hand would be large enough to crush mine. And though Euclid is anything but an author insert (he handles things much better than I would, later on) I think he and I might see eye to eye, and know it’s better to be together in the darkness and the storm. Maybe he’d give me a big smile. Euclid has lots of smiles — one for every occasion.
I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.
